Author: Jeff

Means of Production

Jeff

In classical economics, “Means of production” are the necessary conditions for producing things that do not include financial capital or human beings– together, all three elements are termed “factors of production.” Interestingly, Marx apparently used factors of production interchangeably with productive force (paralleling List’s use of political force). Because Marx and Engels proposed that economics were primary, concern over production was central to their technological theories.

Marxist theory is substantially an instrumental theory in that factors of production include instruments of labor and subjects of labor (raw materials). Encountering this usage, I find myself wondering if it’s actually possible to sort instruments into these niche categories. Recall that Engels had argued that instruments of violence  were the source of all political power; a hammer can be used to produce a house, or to bash in someone’s skull. Given that, are such these terms useable in a coherent manner?

It bears noticing that List’s National System  fed directly into National Socialism as it nationalized industry in the name of the Fatherland, seizing not only the factories but also the raw materials to produce a war machine in the name of political force. Mao and Stalin used Marxist theory to justify deploying their workforce in camps and cooperative farms in the name of national economic force. These developments are part of the reason why by the time Hannah Arendt was approaching her terminology in “On Violence” she chose to avoid the term force to describe this type of means, because force had become synonymous with violence.

Arendt’s vocabulary is attractive because it makes it possible to argue from definitions, which does not seem possible with loose categories like instruments of production and instruments of violence. For example, if we define power as separate from strength then it isn’t possible to talk of the “strength” of a nation-state, because strength is defined as an individual characteristic. Power, on the other hand, could be attributed to the confluence of people working together in the nation-state. Her move to distance violence from either of these categories (by definition) contributes a lot to our understanding of it. However, making the claim that violence is instrumental in nature without clearly differentiating it from instrumental production is a dangerous oversight. I’m discovering that Marx has quite a bit to contribute in this area, if not through a clear frame of reference, through demonstrating just how fraught the terminology is.

Force vacillates between productive and destructive impulses that aren’t teased apart easily. Another aspect is deciding if it is singular (like strength) or plural (like power). Questions for another day.

Infant Industries

Jeff


I wasn’t expecting the evolution of the notion of “force” to lead me to Alexander Hamilton, nor was I expecting it to lead to a deeper understanding of protectionism, which seems to be all the rage with the US government at the present moment. Why?

By the 1960s, UNESCO had begun to argue for a more level playing field for information. The thought was that better informed people made better decisions, and increased innovation through improved technologies. In a strong sense, it was a net neutrality argument before the internet existed. The AT discussions of the 1960s and 1970s were also about unequal access to technologies, and in some ways can be divided between large scale, centralized models like R. Buckminster Fuller and decentralized, individualist models like EF Shumacher. In essence, these approaches were developed to promote equality in technological development by disparate means.

It seems as if Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 Report on Manufactures is the nexus of a lot the centralist side. Hamilton’s infant industry argument is remarkably forward thinking regarding economies of scale. Simply put, Hamilton suggested that moderate tariffs coupled with industry subsidies would allow emergent nations, such as the US, to develop a strong technological and industrial base. Otherwise, more developed nations would simply “undersell” local industries and leave the nation stunted and exploited. The approach is controversial at best, with free trade advocates arguing that economic and technological growth proceeds faster without such measures.

Fuller’s Earth Inc. concept owe much to the ideas suggested by Hamilton. Of course Fuller attempted to side-step the issue by suggesting that we’re one planet, not a cluster of nations– centrist approaches might lead to a more prosperous planet, not simply more prosperous nations. What gets missed in the oversimplified centralist/decentralist framing of the problem is the question of where power, in the sense of potential for action, can possibly be found. Hamilton believed that the power of a nation to act in its interests was key; Fuller’s planetary power simply doesn’t exist as of yet.

After Hamilton, the argument developed in interesting ways through Friedrich List. List was a dual citizen of the US and Germany, owning major property in Pennsylvania. His was the theory of political force that Eugen Duhring deployed, that Engels railed against. Recall that Adam Smith had argued that “rational self-interest,” that is to say individualism,  was the best way to promote economic growth. List, in contrast suggested that the health of the nation depended more on the political force of its citizens to marshal development for the common good: “Canals and railroads may do great good to a nation, but all waggoners will complain of this improvement. Every new invention has some inconvenience for a number of individuals, and is nevertheless a public blessing.” List’s National System, and the related American System, guided technological development that created the modern US.

Engels took exception with the idea that “political force” might function as primary with economic force being a secondary manifestation. Marxist theory might point out that canals and railroads are controlled by bourgeois interests, and industrial development benefits the few rather than the many. Marx conflates under the term “labor” both the instruments of production and the raw material/labor involved. However, the idea that the development and control of instruments of production is key to both the capitalist and communist approaches.

So, in essence it’s technological theories (or turtles) all the way down.

Pudding

Jeff


Alan Gross, my advisor in graduate school at University of Minnesota, frequently accused me of wrestling with pudding. Of course, he also demanded precisely considered and systematic vocabulary for discussing whatever problem/research question at hand. That’s what I find most attractive about Hannah Arendt. The problem is that most terms become slippery under pressure.

Often, people trace the lineage of the instrumental view of technology to Heidegger and stop. Arendt directly cites Engel’s 1877 text, Anti Duhring, which provides a completely different sort of slippage. Why assert that violence requires instruments/technologies? What grounds that? Oddly enough, Engel’s example (taken from Eugen Duhring) is from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a refutation of Duhring’s completely different definition of force. Recall that Arendt considered force to be a term reserved for elemental/non-human means. Duhring (as cited by Engels) had different ideas:

The formation of political relationships is historically the fundamental thing, and instances of economic dependence are only effects or special cases, and are consequently always facts of a second order. Some of the newer socialist systems take as their guiding principle the conspicuous semblance of a completely reverse relationship, in that they assume that political phenomena are subordinate to and, as it were, grow out of the economic conditions. It is true that these effects of the second order do exist as such, and are most clearly perceptible at the present time; but the primary must be sought in direct political force and not in any indirect economic power. (Anti-Duhring)

It’s pretty easy to see what got Engels upset. He (and Marx) were certain that economics was primary. Engels summarizes Duhring’s position, which he sees as unexplained and unargued:

The whole affair has been already proved through the famous original sin, when Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave. That was an act of force, hence a political act. And inasmuch as this enslavement was the starting-point and the basic fact underlying all past history and inoculated it with the original sin of injustice, so much so that in the later periods it was only softened down and “transformed into the more indirect forms of economic dependence” {D. C. 19}; and inasmuch as “property founded on force” {D. Ph. 242}, which has asserted itself right up to the present day, is likewise based on this original act of enslavement, it is clear that all economic phenomena must be explained by political causes, that is, by force. And anyone who is not satisfied with that is a reactionary in disguise. (Anti-Duhring)

Engel’s proof that Duhring’s assertions are ridiculous rests on his reading that Friday was enslaved by Crusoe at the point of a gun, a gun that had been manufactured by technological progress brought about through economics. His analysis is fascinating, and of course wraps around to suggest that in the end all carefully wrought political and economic systems can be destroyed by someone in possession of a superior gun. The idea that violence is instrumental, then, at least partially stems from a particular reading/counter-reading of Robinson Crusoe. In detail, Engel’s analysis goes like this:

The childish example specially selected by Herr Dühring in order to prove that force is “historically the fundamental thing”, therefore, proves that force is only the means, and that the aim, on the contrary, is economic advantage. And “the more fundamental” the aim is than the means used to secure it, the more fundamental in history is the economic side of the relationship than the political side. The example therefore proves precisely the opposite of what it was supposed to prove. And as in the case of Crusoe and Friday, so in all cases of domination and subjection up to the present day. Subjugation has always been—to use Herr Dühring’s elegant expression—a “stomach-filling agency” (taking stomach-filling in a very wide sense), but never and nowhere a political grouping established “for its own sake”. It takes a Herr Dühring to be able to imagine that state taxes are only “effects of a second order”, or that the present-day political grouping of the ruling bourgeoisie and the ruled proletariat has come into existence “for its own sake”, and not as a “stomach-filling agency” for the ruling bourgeois, that is to say, for the sake of making profits and accumulating capital.

However, let us get back again to our two men. Crusoe, “sword in hand” {D. C. 23}, makes Friday his slave. But in order to manage this, Crusoe needs something else besides his sword. Not everyone can make use of a slave. In order to be able to make use of a slave, one must possess two kinds of things: first, the instruments and material for his slave’s labour; and secondly, the means of bare subsistence for him. Therefore, before slavery becomes possible, a certain level of production must already have been reached and a certain inequality of distribution must already have appeared. (Anti-Duhring)

Being the kind of guy I am, of course I had to look at the interlude in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that they insist on pointing at. The course of events that binds Crusoe and “his savage” whom he names Friday is the man’s escape from a group of cannibals, assisted at one point by Crusoe. Crusoe shoots one of the pursuers, nervous that the other thirty cannibals might hear. But he felt threatened because the native had pointed a bow and arrow at him and was about to fire; the second pursuer was laid low by the butt of Crusoe’s rifle. The escapee was grateful:

I beckoned him again to come to me, and gave him all the Signs of Encouragement that I could think of, and he came nearer and nearer, kneeling down every Ten or Twelve steps in token of acknowledgment for my saving his Life. I smiled at him, and looked pleasantly, and beckon’d to him to come still nearer, at length he came close to me, and then kneel’d down again, kissed the Ground, and lead his Head upon the Ground, and taking me by the Foot, set my Foot upon his Head;  this seemed to be in token of swearing to be my slave forever; I took him up, and made much of him, encouraging him all I could. (188)

The gesture, at least the way I read it, is one of fealty. Crusoe interprets it as consent to be a slave; as the native who has been clubbed stirs on the ground, the escapee gestures at a sword at Crusoe’s side and he hands it to him. The escapee then beheads his pursuer, as Crusoe marvels at the ability of the “savage” to wield Western technology. None of the conditions Engels argues from are actually apparent in the novel. Crusoe is barely surviving; he can barely offer even subsistence to his new companion, and only when Friday joins him does he then work out the means that he might enjoy some comforts. Emphasis on the slave dynamic, and superior force are roundly dismissed by Defoe– though Crusoe was initially worried that his companions access to instruments might result in violence, he quickly finds his cares unfounded. Theirs is clearly a political relationship. He is a “slave” through consent, not force.

Means

Jeff

Trying to work my way through the terminology offered by Hannah Arendt in “On Violence” (1968) because they seem quite useful: power, strength, force, and violence. I got sidetracked searching for an umbrella term to group these terms as, and the closest word I could arrive at was means. The O.E.D. had an interesting obsolete definition of mean, which disappeared just after Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” circa 1616.

A condition which permits or is conducive to something; an opportunity. In early use also plural: conditions or offered terms (of peace). Obsolete.

Arendt is speaking directly to the human condition in “On Violence.” Power is something that is defined as being a condition that emerges from human beings acting in concert. It is not a property of an individual, or a structure, or an apparatus– power is a motive term reserved for specific moments of human beings acting or having the potential to act in concert. This contrasts with strength, which is the ability/potential for individuals to provoke an action or response. Force is reserved as a term used for elemental forces, such as the wind, which cannot be possessed by humans only exploited.

What is interesting to me about the early definition of means is that it conflates with opportunity. Rather than offering the criminal justice proposal of means, motive and opportunity, for a short time, means was taken to imply opportunity. Thus, if people have the power they also have the opportunity– Sí se puede! Yes we can!  

Violence, in Arendt’s reasoning, is the opposite of power. Following Engels, Arendt asserts that violence  requires instruments. This is the intersection with technology, and technological theories. Specifically, weapons of violence are instruments that multiply speed, strength, and reach in order to inflict harm. They have an element of arbitrariness, and inflict harm usually with unpredictable consequences, save one– they destroy power.

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where one rules the other is absent. Violence appears when power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as nonviolence; to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it. (155)

There is much to think about here. It is tempting to think that the arbitrariness of violence is brought about through the arbitrary nature of its instrumental means– technologies always have unintended consequences, but that would be a logical fallacy. Equivocating technology and violence is dangerous, I think. But it is hard not to wonder if all multiplications of speed, strength and reach (even in, for example, communication technology) aren’t violent in one way or another.

Arendt asserts categorically that violence cannot create or increase power because it promotes disunity. The arbitrary way that communications technologies, in the name of promoting unity, have increased polarization and disunity, promoting distrust and creating variations on a hallucinatory vision of reality makes me wonder if the idea that technology can lead to a better future dubious at best.

Can technology empower people?

I’m beginning to suspect not. People already have the power.

Community Collapse

Jeff


I suppose the reason why I’ve been thinking hard against the 70s lately is to try to get a grip on my cynicism. I was exposed to a lot of optimism, early on, through the Whole Earth Catalog and 60s “counterculture” and it didn’t necessarily jibe with the world I saw emerging around me. When Buckminster Fuller spoke in 1977 (drawing on his book Earth, Inc. published in 1973) It was starting to become obvious that founding communities based on these theoretical practices was not particularly likely. Thanks to Witold Rybczynski, I’ve started reading a different perspective from a contemporaneous curmudgeon, Martin Pawley. I wish I’d read him then. From The Private Future (1974):

In the private world of the West the chain mail of the old social contract has rusted away, and overlaid upon it is a new, linear pattern of supply and consumption which has erased all intermediate regimes. There is now nothing but a vacant, terrorized space between the government– which controls and maintains production–and the isolated consumer, who increases his consumption in proportion to his isolation. Public life today is the glimpse of the celebrity linked with the product. No one knows his place any more, only what he wants. (5)

It’s a dark and depressing book, really. When Pawley claims “no one knows his place” he isn’t speaking of social level, he’s actually making the claim literally. The central argument of the book is that words like community, society, and family have become meaningless because (by choice) we have designed these groupings as things to be rebelled against and avoided at all costs, in favor of a private world of self-gratification through intense consumerism. And yet those constructs are preconditions for satisfying those desires. In short, it’s not late capitalism that destroyed us, we destroyed ourselves by desiring and insisting upon the current system of consumption and constant progress towards oblivion. What we want, ultimately is to be lost in ourselves rather than present in the world.

The Private Future is a fascinating polemic. The subtitle is “Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West.” I find it fascinating that he’s identified “colony collapse disorder” among humans, long before it became apparent in bees.

For years, I’ve been haunted by the finale of Wim Wenders Until the End of the World (1991). In the wilds of Australia, William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin are lost inside virtual reality headsets that allow them to live inside their own dreams. It’s not necessarily as well argued as Pawley’s book, but it’s certainly entertaining.

The conclusion of the book is striking. I’m not surprised that it’s not mentioned in most reflections on the 70s. Pawley mercilessly calls out the hypocrisy of sanctioning most bourgeois pleasures while criminalizing drugs, pornography, etc.

Drug taking has confirmed a pattern of private indulgence in the face of punitive attempts at prevention. Popular photography, cheap color reproduction and the cinema have converted millions to an image-based, voyeuristic form of sexuality. All these expressions of private freedom, irrespective of their legality, are part of the widespread unremarkable social experience of the citizens of the consumer societies of the West, which is no different in any way from the legally approved forms of private pleasure associated with consumption in any society of private wealth. (210)

For Pawley, the process of privatization– not in the sense of central corporate or governmental ownership, but rather the triumph of individuation over community and retreat to the private sphere–,  is inevitable. His vision of the future is chilling:

Alone in a centrally heated, air-conditioned capsule, drugged, fed with music and erotic imagery, the parts of his consciousness separated into components that reach everywhere and nowhere, the private citizen of the future will become one with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation divorced from action. When the barbarians arrive they will find him like some ancient Greek sage, lost in contemplation, terrified and yet fearless, listening to himself. (211)

Don’t look for any suggestions from Pawley about how to avoid this; for him it was simply inevitable. I certainly hope he isn’t right.

I get around

Jeff

I’ve been told that I’m difficult to follow. I’ve often felt like I’m sitting next to a highway of ideas, and it’s hard to make sense of the small bits that you notice as they fly by. I spent my childhood in, on the west side of Highway 99 from Oildale– hometown of Merle Haggard and home base of Buck Owens, and a former Hooverville. By the time I went to high school, we relocated 30 miles away, just a few miles from the labor camp where Steinbeck did his interviews for what became the Grapes of Wrath. These facts put a certain spin on where I came from that don’t really determine where I ended up. It’s complicated.

I didn’t learn to drive until I was nearly 18. Mostly, I got around by bicycle. I would ride back to Milt’s Coffee Shop, which sat next to Highway 99 between Oildale and my old neighborhood. I’d read William Blake, and Jack Kerouac, and dream of getting on the road and getting the hell out of there. The possibilities were slim. My father dropped out of school when he was in the sixth grade, and most of his education came from the public library. He was the smartest man I knew. My mom had made it through high school, and we were pretty much middle class; my interest in literature, came from my dad who insisted that I read Steinbeck, Hemingway, Shakespeare, et al.. My only option, as far as I knew anyway, for furthering my education was Bakersfield Community College– which at the time offered free tuition.

But underneath it all, there was always science– I took all the science and math classes in my high school. I  had been interested in ecology since I was in the sixth grade, so when Buckminster Fuller came to lecture at BC, I was there. Twenty years before I returned to college to study English Literature and Rhetoric, I encountered the twisted prose of Fuller.

Just what was it about? Fuller’s opening statement is nearly Faulkneresque

What I am trying to do

Acutely aware of our beings’ limitations and acknowledging the infinite mystery of the a priori Universe in which we are born but nevertheless searching for a conscious means of hopefully competent participation by humanity in its own evolutionary trending while employing only the unique advantages inherently exclusive to those individuals who take and maintain the economic initiative in the face of the formidable physical capital and credit advantages of the major corporations and political states and deliberately avoiding political ties and tactics while endeavoring by experiments and explorations to excite individuals awareness and realization of humanities higher potentials I seek through comprehensive anticipatory design science and its reductions to physical practice to reform the environment instead of trying to reform humans, being intent thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less whereby in turn the wealth augmenting prospects of such design science regenerations will induce their spontaneous and economically successful industrial proliferation by world around services’ managements all of which chain provoking events will both permit and induce all humanity to realize full lasting economic and physical success plus enjoyment of all the earth without one individual interfering with or being advantaged at the expense of another. R. Buckminster Fuller (1)

Now that’s a sentence. The basic idea of Fuller’s lecture was easy to grasp– he suggested that the world be tied together into a single power/resource grid thereby raising the standard of living of everyone to a level just below that of the US. His argument was that it wouldn’t harm the west that much to be more egalitarian in order to reduce suffering in the world, because technology would make it possible.

Now that I’m older, better trained, and able to parse complicated sentences such as this one it’s easier to see where this movement went wrong. Witold Rybczynski points out that the techno-utopians of the 60s and 70s built massive verbal monuments based on a few actual prototypes; in short, they became a cult of “true believers” where no one dare question the practicality of what they proposed. But it was intoxicating to me as a young man.

Revisiting this spot on the highway, what stands out to me is the way Fuller leans into comprehensive anticipatory design science. It’s easy to see the hubris these days, as if we could predict the behavior or adoption of a technology once it was loosed on the world. One need not be anti-technology to suggest that technologies do fail in unexpected ways. Currently, a great deal of California is on fire due to power lines sparking in unanticipated ways in the Santa Ana winds. Even knowing the causes, solutions will frequently elude us.

Most people recognize Fuller for his invention of the Geodesic Dome, which was a prototype solution to enclose space with lowest amount of material for a given volume. I drove past a residential dome in the North Country yesterday, partly prompting this post. Geodesic domes are a bad choice for residences, they leak– badly. This one was heavily modified, of course, no doubt to deal with those unanticipated problems. Sometimes these utopian ideas are best viewed from a distance, like Montreal’s Biosphere.

On Violence

Jeff

Hats on parade
I’ve driven from Minnesota on I-35 across Iowa to Kansas City and then down the length of Missouri to Arkansas so many times in my life it’s hard not to be sick of it. In June 2018, attempting to make things at least a little different, we were going to cut across to central Iowa and down through the heart of Missouri. We pulled off at a truck stop a little north of Ames and a bit past the crash site of Buddy Holly’s airplane (the day the music died). Anticipating arriving in Arkansas through Harrison (perhaps the white supremacist capitol of the midwest), I snapped a photo of a hat display. Krista bought ice cream and pulled out a book to read.

She was working on an essay dealing with digital aggression, and felt that she needed to read “On Violence” by Hannah Arendt. She asked me if I’d like to be entertained, volunteering to read it aloud. I realize that this isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but for us, it qualifies.

Written in 1969 in reaction to the movement toward violent methods in student protests, the essay was amazingly relevant to thinking about technology and a fine gateway into a number of oft recited truisms that I was considering. Assistive technologies are often born during wartime. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the heart of the civil war, found inspiration in the new forms of mechanical limbs being created in his essay The Human Wheel, its Spokes and Felloes, for example, and Krista’s focus on hearing aids has meant facing how involved Bell Laboratories wartime listening technologies are in these peaceable devices. However, I never considered the possibility that technologies themselves are inherently bound to violence, an idea presented as fact at the outset of this essay.

Since violence– as distinct from power, force or strength– always needs implements (as Engels pointed out long ago), the revolution of technology, a revolution in toolmaking, was especially marked in warfare. The very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which is needed to reach it. (106)

“He who lives by the sword, dies by sword,” as the cliché goes. Arendt goes on to also connect violence with arbitrariness; the action of instruments of violence are almost always bound to an unpredictability of outcome. Something can always go wrong. Arendt connects this with violence itself; others have laid the blame for this characteristic on technology. The introduction of technology always has unintended consequences, and frequently technologies simply fail.

Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably be predicted, the means to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals. (106)

We left the highway and headed across Iowa towards the center, pausing for another stop near Pella– one of the largest window manufacturers in the country. Big trucks and bleak landscapes. Iowa is flat, and the signposts are artificial landmarks in an indistinct, unnatural terrain.

Pella
IA

At the onset of the anthropocene, this was tallgrass prairie. There are no interstate highways, only two lane state roads. As we crossed the border into Missouri, it dawned on me that I’d never been here before. The major highways run along the Mississippi, through St Louis to the east and through Kansas City on the western border. The landscape there is different. Just north of Kansas City there’s a tourist trap dedicated to the outlaw Jesse James, the James Farm– just off of the route I usually took. But closer to the center, it’s greener with a bit more agriculture. Krista noted that they were beginning to mow hay in early June.

Jesse James Ranch
2006

In the nineteenth century, farmers were frustrated by their ability to penetrate the dense sod with wooden plows. John Deere of Illinois developed the steel plow, which allowed the destruction fo the tallgrass prairie to turn it into more “productive” land, which in turn lead to the muddying of the Mississippi river and more intense flood cycles downstream. In the early twentieth century, the boom and bust of flooding had altered the landscape of the entire center of the country, ultimately turning it into a place that people simply pass through on the way somewhere else. Jesse James and John Deere are symbols of two different sorts of violence. Swords and plowshares are violent implements.

MO

Arendt rightly points out that framing history as the progression of one state of being to another created by antagonistic forces rests on a metaphor (rather than a fact) of continuity:

Of course, there are a few melancholy side effects in the reassuring idea that we need only march into the future which we cannot help doing anyhow, in order to find a better world. There is first the simple fact that the general future of mankind has nothing to offer the individual life, whose only certain future is death. (128-9)

Krista continued reading across Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, etc., all the way into Virginia where we visited James Madison’s slave-built mansion. The hay harvest proceeded, apace.

Clio

Jeff

Clio, muse of history
On the eve of bringing (hopefully) new animals into our house, I thought it would be good to sit down and write a bit about one of my best friends, Clio, who is recently deceased. People get confused about her name, so some accounting is in order.

When we first moved to Syracuse, I was immersed in studying nineteenth century photographic history. Though I’d been a photographer most of my life, I hadn’t really thought about it as a livelihood. It was more a vocation, a calling, rather than an employment opportunity. The lens of history is selective, and it distorts things. For every photograph that rests on a museum wall, there are a thousand more in the museum of the basement or archive without celebration or often even attribution. They are the the leftovers of history, the pieces left out of the stories we construct to try to understand ourselves, and how we got here. Mostly, I was discovering, that in the late nineteenth century, for women and middle class men, photography was a way to make a living.

I arrived in Syracuse ready to build a new life, because my wife had achieved that impossible dream of a solid tenure-track position at a good university. I came out in advance, while she was finishing her dissertation, to find and buy (for the first time in my life) a house. I was shell-shocked at the sheer creepiness and ugliness of the place. The first day I drove in past (I kid you not)  a seemingly abandoned strip club called the “Bada Bing.” Clearly, there was going to be an adjustment to living here compared to the Twin Cities. Thankfully, during grad school I had done well as an investor and was prepared to get us settled and get my wife through the tenure process. But living in this city really wasn’t my dream.

Nonetheless, we managed to locate a nice older tract house near the edge of the county, bordering on nice farm country. I found myself just relaxing driving to it, out of the city and past a tiny duck pond on a stream, to a quiet neighborhood. I felt like we could all think there. We bought it.

We were in the city, just leaving the mortgage broker’s office. Standing outside while the lawyers and real estate agents were making small talk, I heard a little “mew” from the bushes. Krista looked on in disbelief as I went tromping out into the shrubbery. I found her. And I named her almost immediately. She was small– not really old enough to be weened. The photo that leads this post was taken in my lap, as I sat in the car while Krista drove the Uhaul truck we rented to buy  a bed with down to a pet store to buy kitten milk and supplies before I drove her there, our first new resident in our new home.

She was Clio, muse of history. Even though she grew up looking like a supermodel, she wasn’t named for Cleopatra. I felt like we were building a new history here, and from the moment we moved into our house she was with us. I enjoyed the pun of calling her my “mews,” and I didn’t know at the time that eventually we ended up calling her “mew” as often as anything else. She was the queen of this house.

Another popular nickname, though, was Fuzzolini. There wasn’t a thing that came into the house that she didn’t inspect. She made sure we were always in the correct place and time, herding us to get there. If we weren’t in the den at the correct time, she’d yell at you until you quit working and retired for the day. She sat on my wife’s desk as she slogged away at that first book, until at the appointed time she’d bug her until she quit. She was always the timekeeper, and the one that made sure that you followed through on anything you promised.

An unfortunate incident with canned cat food when she first got here almost made her a vegetarian, though she had a soft spot for factory fried chicken, “chicken of the cave” as Krista was fond of calling it. She was bossy, and persistent, and the master of protocol. I was only allowed (without protest) to pick her up in the kitchen, where it was my job to act as a mobile kitty platform and look out all the windows with her, and most of all, allow her to better keep an eye on Krista as she was cooking. As she got older, she became increasingly Krista’s kitty so much so that Krista insisted that we get Thalia so that I could have a kitty for myself.

But I had to remind her– I was the first one to hear Clio, and she always came to me when I was sad or troubled. She was my kitty too. And I miss her. She asked me to take her for a spin around the kitchen just a half an hour before she died. Everything seemed fine. She was happy, and purring. She died quickly and without warning, and left a huge hole in our house, which was as much hers as ours.

Clio was very much a winter kitty, part Maine Coon with huge pants like a cossack that were impossible to capture in pictures. It seems inconceivable to go through the winter without our companion.

On Sunday, we’ll drive north, nearly to Canada, to have a look at a brother and sister pair of cats that seem interesting. The shelter calls them their “lion king litter” and they’re about six months old. If they are interested, they might come live with us.

The Long View

Jeff2 Comments
Whenever you are lost, remember to turn around
inspirobot

When I was in graduate school in Minnesota, blogs I read were quite taken by Graphs, Maps, Trees by Franco Moretti. The basic premise, as I recall, was that the days of “close reading” of texts were done and what remained was to quantitatively compile data for “distant reading” of the complex currents of literary history to learn more than what we had by the concentration on specific details. This movement from micro to macro level emphasis wasn’t something that really ever interested me much; it seemed inhuman to consider the herd to be more significant than individual animals.

Coincidentally (or not) trackers acting to compile the reading and traffic patterns of the web (and blogs) were emerging with a vengeance. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the specifics from my memory, but I remember Blogdex from Cameron Marlow at MIT (2003-2006) which indexed about 9,000 blogs in the beginning, and Technorati that listed blogs indexed by incoming and outgoing links to expose a new generation of online writing. These people were individuals, though in most tellings of the tale they ultimately became datapoints for the brave new world of web traffic metrics.

After the first ten years, blogs were mostly gone and replaced by “social media” services that lowered the bar for entry, and lessened the commitment involved for writing online. And it also became a big money enterprise, where advertisers were quickly carving up the pie of data into ever more tightly focused niche markets. What killed blogs, I think, was the rise in another data herd progeny, spam. Sites were hammered with AI generated link spam to alter search engine rankings, and email spam drove people crazy. It was a matter of percentages. If you transmit a million spam messages, it only takes a tiny percentage of stupid or inattentive people to accidentally fall prey to the scam. Then, you’re rich (or president).

In the end, many blogs were forced to shut down the latest innovations (like trackbacks, which notified people when they were referenced by another online writer) and worst of all, end commenting altogether to avoid the hostility and commercial intrusions into their thoughts. Many creative talents, in my mind, were driven away and those who were left were primarily driven by financial gain.

Taking the long view and privileging  distant reading has reaped great rewards at the expense of any sense of individuality. Watching a sort of return to the narrow focused, less connected individual blogging that used to be the norm among a cadre of early adopters has been curious. It’s easy to drift away from this, it’s a lot of work and presents little reward. For me it was always more than a “cult of personality” where one or two voices would dominate the conversations.

There were so many tiny conversations, and it makes me sad to think of what potentialities were missed in pursuit of the long view.

Paper Heroes

Jeff

Cover of Paper Heroes

Witold Rybczynski’s 1980 book fills in some gaps in understanding the rhetoric of utopian technological movements of the 60s and 70s. The second edition, from 1991, includes and epilogue which attempts to connect that rhetoric to the latest flavor of its time, sustainable development. It’s a cynical book, perhaps, but it is the kindest of critiques– I suspect that he, and every technological nerd of these times truly wants there to be a solution to useful deployments of technology for a common good.

The problem is that most of this literature is long on promises, and short on well thought out and executed examples. In  short, it’s a game primarily played by upper class white people to assuage their guilt over rampant overconsumption. I’m looking at you, professors at Cornell with six figure salaries tooling around in expensive SUVs with “Save the Whales” stickers.

AT (either unpacked as “alternative technology” or “appropriate technology”) is a cluster of ideas/technologies that are long on slogans and boosters but short on rational discussion– such as wind power, solar energy, etc. The roots trace to E.F. Shumacher’s book Small is Beautiful, and proceed through ideas like Green Revolution. Rybczynski rightfully points out the cult-like “true believer” culture that emerged from these napkin sketch level ideas. Ideas deserve more rigorous consideration. Little has changed. The world is full of paper heroes whose contributions are slogans and empty persuasion; it’s interesting to me to follow younger people in the newer craft moments discovering these books, thinking that the concepts and slogans can be simply transported to the present to some effect. Fact is, they were pretty ineffectual then and would be now if adopted wholesale. It has to be noted that critiquing those ideas is even less popular, and probably the reason Rybczynski’s book is sadly out of print.

He thought then, and I must agree, that there is much to be learned from these old utopian technology movements– largely to avoid the same sort of mistakes of sloganeering and assumptions of white, frequently male, privilege. I’m impressed that Rybczynski spotted it in 1980:

Perhaps the most important role that the AT movement has played in international development has not been as the inventor of a new approach, but rather as a reminder to the international development establishment that a large number of people have been left out of the development process and that technological options do exist which could begin to rectify the situation. However, as an attempt to demodernize technology and take an alternative path, Appropriate Technology is doomed to failure. It is a pretentious, romantic, even poignant attempt to stop the ocean with a child’s beach shovel and play bucket. (166)

As a woodworker, I have really enjoyed dealing with technology at a very up close and personal level. There was a trend, when I was growing up (as exemplified by Norm Abram, and shows like Home Improvement) to look to new small scale power tool technologies as a solution to building things. In the last decade or so, human powered tools are making a comeback with an equal amount of sloganeering. On either side, there haven’t been a shortage of “guru” type figures like Roy Underhill. It isn’t that the technologies being evangelized are inherently superior or inferior, but rather that the majority of people who lack the means, training, or space are left out.

The message shouldn’t be taken to be that “woodworking is a bourgeois activity” but rather that there is a problem with the cultish, elitist pronouncements that the problem is “solved” by these approaches. The problem is rather that effort must be made to bring education and technology to everyone in a more equitable fashion, rather than concentrating on those who have the means/dollars to deploy them.

For me, Saint Roy’s most powerful message is that historical technologies (wedge & edge) are not quaint ways of doing things but meaningful tools for the future. Technology does offer the means to solving our problems. But we’ve got to look for the complications posed by accessibility. Not everyone can build a geothermal or solar powered home, or even a log cabin– but these technologies must stay in our field for vision as potential solutions.